Kibblesworth Academy

Teaching of Reading

Reading at Kibblesworth Academy
 
At Kibblesworth Academy we love reading and we want all of our pupils to love it too. Children begin by learning to read and then progress on to reading to learn.
 
The reading journey in school begins in Nursery where children are exposed to a range of carefully chosen stories and rhymes to support their early sound awareness and phonic understanding. Alongside this, children are encouraged to take home one of our story sacks to develop their love of reading by sharing a book with their parents and families. 
 
In EYFS and KS1, children focus on learning to read through the decoding of familiar and unfamiliar words. Underpinning the success of this is the understanding that children know that letters represent sounds. To facilitate this, daily discreet phonic sessions are taught in Reception and KS1 to ensure children know and are able to recognise sounds when reading; children then progress onto applying their phonic awareness to their spelling.

Once children are confident readers, they progress onto ‘reading to learn’. This is done through focussed guided reading and comprehension sessions.
 
Books and reading at home
 
Children are provided with whole books as soon as they begin to segment and blend. In Reception, children start with Read Write Inc. sound blending books, before moving on to the Read Write Inc. progressive story books. When children are secure in their phonic knowledge and reading with fluency, they are transitioned to our book band system which uses Star Reader and Accelerated Reader to support the careful selection high quality texts to further their fluency and comprehension. This is also integrated with our Reading Rails programme to develop breadth, challenge, and a life long love of reading. 
 
How we teach early reading
 
What is Read Write Inc Phonics?
Read Write Inc is a consistent, rigorous and dynamic literacy programme to teach EVERY child to read by the age of six. Using synthetic phonics, children quickly learn to blend letter sounds together following a fun and effective programme.
 
Why do we use Read Write Inc? 
The RWI programme has been proven to be a very successful method of teaching every child to read using phonics. Evidence of this can be found in the Ofsted Report, Reading by six; how the best schools do it. 
 
Who will be following the Read Write Inc programme? 
All children in Early Years and Key Stage 1 will be following the programme. They will be assessed and put into groups specific to their reading level. Children will be taught phonics daily using specific RWI phonics books that stay in school. You child will bring a specific reading book home with them and it is important that you listen to your child read regularly. 
 
Year 1 phonics screening
 

Children in Year 1 throughout the country take part in a phonics screening check in June. Children in Year 2 will also take the check if they did not achieve the required result when in Year 1, or they have not taken the test before.

The phonics screening check is designed to confirm whether individual children have learnt sufficient phonic decoding and blending skills to an appropriate standard.

What happens during the test? 

The test contains 40 words. The list of words the children read is a combination of 20 real words and 20 Alien words (nonsense words). Each child will sit one to one with a teacher and read each word aloud. The test will take approximately 10 minutes, although children are all different and will complete the check at their own pace.

For more information: https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/at-school/primary-school-assessment-tests/year-1-phonics-screening-check/

 

 

 

What should I read at home? 
Your  child will bring home a range of books from school, some they may know well. Please don't say "This is too easy." Instead, encourage your child to tell you the story out loud, ask them questions about things that happen, what they think about some of the characters in the story, or even what might happen next. 
 
 
Reading Expectations
 
By the end of Year 2, your child should be able to read aloud books with increased fluency. In Key Stage 2, we focus on deepening our understanding of plots points, character motivations and developing reading comprehension. 
 
We encourage and expect children to read for between 20-30 minutes every night at home, depending on their age. To promote this, children have a Learning Journal where parents are expected to comment on their child’s reading every night. Teachers use this log to assist with their own assessment of a child’s reading successes and next steps as well as gauging the appropriateness of a child’s reading book.
Book Talk by Jane Considine

As a school we have adopted ‘Book Talk’ by Jane Considine. It is a systematic way to teach reading comprehension from Year 1 upwards.

 

  • Each Book Talk session is layered with open-ended whole class questions to tackle the three layers of the reading rainbow. 
  • This approach to teaching comprehension provides consistency across our school for the children as well as enabling deeper reading questions to be discussed and modelled. 
  • The key element of this approach is to develop children’s vocabulary when talking about texts.